Live Stream 1980: Netizens Teach Me How to Make a Rocket by Hand

three days later.

Tianjin, Hongxing Semiconductor Laboratory.

The early spring sunlight slanted in through the window, falling on the drawings and graph paper scattered across the table.

There was a faint scent of pine in the air, along with the metallic smell of the sintering furnace after it cooled down.

When Lin Xi pushed open the door, the three people inside had already been waiting for a while.

Zhang Bingqian was sitting on the left.

This veteran in China's integrated circuit design industry has an old knee injury and always has the habit of stretching one leg out when he sits down.

The enamel mug was placed beside him, its rim stained with a dark ring of tea stains from years of tea.

Next to him is Zhao Sihai.

With a background as an eighth-grade craftsman, his thick film sintering skills are renowned at Red Star Semiconductor.

The control panel of the Dongfanghong-2 satellite almost jammed back then, and it was he and his team who managed to revive it.

At the workbench by the window, Situ Yuan was looking down, using tweezers to hold a test substrate, without even looking up.

Lin Xi didn't put on airs as a general manager; he went over and refilled Zhang Bingqian's enamel mug with some hot water.

Then he took out a hand-drawn sketch from his briefcase and laid it flat on the table.

"Old Zhang, Master Zhao, Chief Engineer Situ."

Lin Xi spoke sincerely.

"I'm back in Tianjin this time because I want to show everyone something new."

"This is the high-performance condition monitoring architecture we will use in the next generation of high-end spacecraft."

He didn't mention the manned spacecraft or the top-secret codename of Project 851, only discussing the technical requirements.

Zhang Bingqian put on his reading glasses and leaned closer to the blueprints.

After watching for two minutes, he reached out and pointed to the densely packed nodes:

"Kobayashi, this drawing you made..."

The old man frowned.

"It doesn't seem to be a simple control chip."

"Are all these data acquisition channels meant to capture the voltage, current, and temperature of all the critical equipment on the spacecraft?"

"right."

Lin Xi nodded.

"Our spacecraft systems are too complex right now."

"If a sensor or line malfunctions, it can take several months to troubleshoot on the ground."

"I want to build an independent monitoring bus."

"It does not participate in the main control; it is only responsible for monitoring all physical layer data in real time."

"It reports the location directly where the problem is."

Zhao Sihai pulled the blueprint over and ran his rough hands over the paper a couple of times.

Having worked in a factory all his life, he had an almost animalistic intuition for these wiring patterns and layouts.

"Mr. Lin, your requirements are quite high."

Zhao Sihai raised his head.

"We need a lot of channels, fast response, and the volume has to be drastically reduced, right?"

"Yes."

Lin Xi said.

"Rocket carrying capacity is precious; every gram saved is a gram saved."

Zhao Sihai grinned.

"Making it using pure silicon-based integrated circuits would be a long shot."

"The temperature changes drastically in the sky, and the particle flow is also fierce, so it's not uncommon for power lines to be damaged."

He touched the prickly stubble on his chin, but his eyes lit up.

"But our thick-film process is exactly what we're capable of handling this job!"

He made two rough sketches on the drawing:

"Using alumina ceramic as the substrate, conductor paste and resistor paste are layered and printed on it."

"Ceramic substrates have good thermal conductivity, high temperature resistance, and excellent insulation properties."

"Although the wiring in this diagram is dense, the screen printing precision on my end can now reach 15 micrometers."

Zhao Sihai got more and more excited as he spoke.

"We've integrated hundreds of monitoring nodes onto a palm-sized thick-film ceramic plate, which definitely reduces the overall size!"

Zhang Bingqian echoed:

"Old Zhao is right."

"The underlying logic comparison operation can be made into a bare die using simple silicon-based gate circuits, and then directly packaged on a thick film circuit."

"This is called hybrid integration."

"Its anti-interference capability is much stronger than that of pure silicon wafers."

The two worked in perfect harmony, and a highly practical and contemporary plan quickly took shape.

Lin Xi nodded repeatedly, secretly relieved.

Entrusting the blueprints to these veteran frontline workers is always the most reassuring approach.

They don't just talk about concepts.

They can tell at a glance whether it's feasible, how to do it, and where it will explode.

Just then, Situ Yuan, who had been silent all along, turned around.

He put down the tweezers in his hand, walked to the table, and glanced at Lin Xi's drawings.

This top architect, who had spent over a decade at Fairchild Semiconductor, adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses and uttered a startling statement:

"Mr. Lin, since we're going to use thick-film capacitors for the physical monitoring network, why not just integrate an in-memory computing architecture into it?"

The room fell silent for a moment.

Zhang Bingqian was stunned:

"Situ, explain yourself clearly, what does 'integrated storage and computing' mean?"

Situ Yuan picked up a red pen and drew two squares on Lin Xi's drawing paper.

"Modern computers, even the most advanced processors, use the von Neumann architecture."

Situ Yuan wrote "Calculation" on the left border and "Storage" on the right border.

"The processing unit and the storage unit are separate."

"When the processor needs to calculate a piece of data, it has to first move the data from memory."

"After you've finished calculating, move it back."

He looked at Lin Xi:

"This would be fine for running a regular computer on the ground."

"But in space, this logic will bring two problems at the same time."

One is the storage wall.

One is the risk of radiation.

Lin Xi followed up by asking:

"How exactly do you mean it?"

Situ Yuan drew an X on the line connecting the two boxes with his pen.

"This connection is the storage wall."

"When you need to monitor 100,000 nodes of a spacecraft simultaneously and require extremely high concurrent processing speeds, your processor spends most of its time queuing up to do manual tasks."

"It's like a group of workers who are clearly capable of doing the work, but they're all blocking the warehouse entrance waiting for materials."

"No matter how fast you calculate, if you can't move the bricks quickly enough, the system will still crash."

"The result is high power consumption and high latency."

Upon hearing this, Zhao Sihai's smile vanished.

Zhang Bingqian's finger also stopped at the edge of the teacup.

"Secondly, there are high-energy particle streams in space."

Situ Yuan made a heavy slap on the box representing the storage unit.

"High-energy particles bombarding silicon-based memory chips can cause single-particle flipping."

"It was originally stored as 0, but after being bumped, it became 1."

"If one number is wrong, everything else—from moving and calculating to judging—will be wrong as well."

"In a more serious case, the control logic will go completely off track."

This insightful yet simple explanation left Zhang Bingqian and Zhao Sihai both gasping in astonishment.

This is precisely the physical law-level problem faced by aerospace electronic systems.

At this moment, in the live stream in Lin Xi's mind, the professional experts who usually stayed hidden were already unable to contain themselves.

Holy crap! He had deposits and withdrawals integrated in 1985?!

This isn't just a little bit ahead of schedule, it's a complete overhaul of the version number!

[The von Neumann bottleneck, the memory wall, single-event upset... he pointed out all the fatal flaws that hindered future improvements in aerospace computing power.]

[When using silicon-based chips for high-performance computing, heat generation, power consumption, and radiation protection are all unavoidable challenges. Finally, adding a bunch of shielding layers makes the weight all about durability.]

[Got it. While others are still building armor around their chips, Red Star is preparing to switch species.]

Lin Xi suppressed the shock in her heart and looked at Situ Yuan:

"Chief Engineer Situ, how exactly does the integrated storage and computing you mentioned translate into this blueprint?"